"Personalizing the body"

Jag kan inte låta bli att citera ur Terry Eagletons intressanta och utmanande "After theory":

"The body, that inconvenient reminder of mortality, is plucked, pierced, etched, pummeled, pumped up, shrunk and remoulded. Flesh is converted into sign, staving off the moment when it will subside into the sheer pornographic meaninglessness of a corpse. Dead bodies are indecent: they proclaim with embarrassing candour the secret of all matter, that it has no obvious relation to meaning. What seems a celebration of the body, then, may also cloak a virulent anti-materialism - a desire to gather this raw, perishable stuff into the less corruptible forms of art or discourse. [ ... ] It is a disavowal of death, a refusal of the limit which is ourselves."

"Personalizing the body may be a way of denying its essential impersonality. Its impersonality lies in the fact that it belongs to the species before it belongs to me; and there are some aspects of the species-body - death, vulnerability, sickness and the like - that we may well prefer to thrust into oblivion."

"It [the body] is not a possession, like a scarlet fez or a mobile phone. Who would be the possessor? It sounds odd to call a 'possession' something wich I never acquired and could never give away. [ ... ] The body is the most palpable sign we have of the giveness of human existence. It is not something we get to choose."